Chess in The New Yorker

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  • Chess in The New Yorker

    Chess in The New Yorker

    December 31, 2015

    In the January 4, 2016 issue of The New Yorker magazine there is a description of a simul that Fabiano Caruana recently gave for the Chess Works! program for children in New Jersey.

    One bit from “Your Move” by David Owen:

    Caruana lived in Brooklyn between the ages of four and twelve, then moved to Madrid, Budapest, and Lugano. He now lives in Florida. On a recent Monday, he was in Jersey City, at the Liberty Science Center, where he played a chess game against twenty players even younger than he is.

    See: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...enty-opponents

    If you scroll down the virtual page, you will find two more articles. “The Return of the Chess Cheat” by Simon Parkin, from the April 17, 2015 issue. It starts off with this lovely (but gory) paragraph:

    Accounts vary as to how exactly a chess game between King Canute the Great and one of his most trusted Viking chieftains, Earl Ulf, went down, in 1026, but certainly cheating was involved, and for at least one party the match proved fatal. In their 1851 book “The Chess Player, ” the German chess masters Bernhard Horwitz and Josef Kling tell a version of the story in which the king made a “false move” and lost one of his knights. Canute “would not have this, ” they write, and insisted that he be allowed a redo, at which suggestion Ulf “waxed angry” and overturned the board. (The match took place at a banquet; he may have been emboldened by mead.) Things escalated. The king accused Ulf of cowardice, prompting the earl to remind Canute of the assistance he had rendered him at the Helge River, when, he gibed, “the Swedes beat you like a dog.” Ulf turned on his heel and retired for the night. It was to be his last: Canute had him killed in church the next day.
    ______

    The third article is even older, “The Prince’s Gambit” by D.T. Max from March 21, 2011, about the development of Magnus Carlsen. From that:
    When Carlsen was about five, his father, who was then working as a supply manager for Exxon, brought out the chessboard. Henrik had played the game well as a young man. He wanted to teach his oldest child, Ellen, and Magnus, who is a year younger. But neither paid much attention, and Henrik grew frustrated and gave up. “I said to myself, ‘Maybe chess is not for them. It doesn’t matter—they can do something else. ’ ” During these years, Magnus was more engaged by soccer and skiing, and the family already played hearts, bridge, and Monopoly; in those contests, Ellen and Ingrid, who is three years younger than Magnus, ganged up on him.

    When Magnus was almost eight, Henrik made another attempt to interest the kids in chess. Magnus liked games, and this time, he recalled, he found it “just a richer and more complicated game than any other. ” He soon beat Ellen, who quit playing. Magnus began consulting his father’s small collection of chess books. He read “Find the Plan, ” by Bent Larsen, a standard introductory text, and more advanced books, like “The Complete Dragon. ” (The title refers to a form of defense in which the pattern of pawns resembles a dragon’s tail.) He was the sort of child who studied what interested him and ignored what didn’t. School, which bored him, was quickly supplanted by chess. “During the whole third grade, I think it’s fair to say, I didn’t do my homework once, ” he recalled. At breakfast, he sat down at his own table and tested chess moves on a board. He recalled, “I found it natural—I didn’t really have the need to socialize with my family over meals. Dinner I, of course, ate with them. ”

    After playing for a year, Magnus beat Henrik for the first time, in a game of “blitz chess, ” in which each player has five minutes to make all his moves. Magnus began to play in local junior competitions. Henrik picked him up after ski-jump practice and ferried him to the chess tournaments. Carlsen’s family was not unlike those American families in which the parents are careful not to tell their children that they have to excel but the children sense it anyway. Håkon Åmdal, a friend of Carlsen’s from school, says, “My impression is that Magnus chose to play chess by himself, but he has this feeling that he satisfies his dad by it. ”

    In March, 2000, Henrik arranged for Magnus, now nine, to spend a few hours every week with a chess teacher, Torbjørn Ringdal Hansen, a former Norwegian junior champion. Carlsen liked Hansen’s casual style; the classes were more like spirited bull sessions. The teacher, in turn, was struck by his pupil’s gifts. “Everything I said he understood so easily, ” Hansen told me.
    ________

    Good writing from The New Yorker

  • #2
    Re: Chess in The New Yorker

    Chess in The New Yorker

    July 30, 2017

    There is an article on Levon Aronian on-line in The New Yorker for July 29, 2017. It may be behind a pay-wall but I shall quote the first paragraph for those interested:

    http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporti...es-of-a-nation

    A Chess Master with an Unpredictable Style and the Hopes of a Nation

    By Sean Williams

    Armenia is chess’s perennial overachiever, and Levon Aronian, its greatest player, is a swashbuckling throwback

    In 1988, war broke out between Armenia and its Soviet Republic neighbor of Azerbaijan, over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. It was another tragedy in a century of tragedies for Armenia, going back to the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian people, beginning in 1915. When the 1988 war began, thousands of ethnic Armenians who lived in Azerbaijan fled their homes. One of them was Melikset Khachiyan, a chess player who studied the game, as a teen-ager, under Tigran Petrosian, Armenia’s greatest-ever player. Khachiyan had shown early promise, but a shot at the game’s highest level, in an era of legends like Kasparov, Karpov, and Tal, eluded him. Now he needed a place to stay. He headed to Yerevan, Armenia’s pretty, pink-stoned capital; there, Grigory and Seda Aronian offered him a room in their modest home on the edge of town. Rather than pay rent, they suggested, he could teach their six-year-old son, Levon, chess.

    Sean Williams is a British writer and journalist

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    • #3
      Re: Chess in The New Yorker

      The New Yorker seems to publish at least one chess story a year. A great magazine, with Canadians Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell writing for them. They even invited my wife and I to sit at their table at the Washington Correspondent's Dinner (since my wife had them talk at Luminato), where Obama roasted Trump. It was priceless watching Trump's reaction. I am a big fan of the New Yorker.

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      • #4
        Re: Chess in The New Yorker

        Originally posted by Ian Findlay View Post
        I am a big fan of the New Yorker.
        Roger that. These days a subscription includes full online access to every issue all the way back to 1925. Just the other day I got into the 1964 issues and read John Cheever's original short story "The Swimmer." Late (in 1968) it was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster, which I saw in the theatre. And of course there are those thousands and thousands of cartoons...

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        • #5
          Re: Chess in The New Yorker

          Chess in The New Yorker

          August 18, 2017

          From the article Garry Kasparov Returns, Briefly, to Chess

          http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporti...iefly-to-chess

          by Louisa Thomas

          On Wednesday, in the seventh round, against David Navara, a thirty-two-year-old Czech grand master, Kasparov started to look like the king of old. Playing with the white pieces, he chose a sharp line, including a pawn sacrifice on move nine that allowed him to activate his more powerful pieces faster and gave him a strong blockading knight and big positional advantage. Before he made a move, his fingers would flicker over the position, then he would swiftly slide a piece into its proper place—or, occasionally, he’d pause with his hand on the piece, then move it somewhere else, as if listening to some corrective voice in his head. After trading queens with Navara, he seemed almost certain to convert his advantage to a win. Navara’s position was completely lost.

          But, instead of making an obviously good push with his pawn, Kasparov rubbed his chin and moved his knight instead. And, suddenly, the huge advantage was gone. Navara, not Kasparov, saw the brilliant final combination: a pretty queen sacrifice that led to a second promotion of pawn to queen. When Kasparov realized his fate, he leaned back, looked at the ceiling, and resigned. While Navara helped the arbiter reset the board, Kasparov grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair and left the hall. When I asked Yasser Seirawan, a four-time U.S. champion and a contemporary of Kasparov, whether he had ever seen anything like it from the Russian, he did not hesitate before answering no. Blunders happen, even to the top players, especially in short time controls; many of the games in St. Louis, in fact, were a crazy, exciting mess. But they don’t usually happen like that to Kasparov, whose consistency was part of his brilliance. “Seeing Garry here is great,” he told me, “but not seeing him at his best is not so great. Getting old is not all it’s cracked up to be.”
          Last edited by Wayne Komer; Saturday, 19th August, 2017, 02:02 AM.

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          • #6
            Chess in The New Yorker

            September 6, 2018

            From the article: Rules for Trump Chess by Andrew Paul

            https://www.newyorker.com/humor/dail...or-trump-chess

            Fourteen rules are given, here are the first four:

            1. Each turn is referred to as a “news cycle.”

            2. One side retains the pieces used in standard chess; the other side consists entirely of pawns. The player with only pawns is nevertheless loudly and repeatedly assured that he or she still has all the regular pieces.

            3. About a third of the all-pawn lineup doesn’t see anything wrong with the opponent’s king winning, and will be of no use to the player.

            4. A handful of new pieces will be introduced during game play, scattered haphazardly across the board. They include: two overcooked macaroni noodles (Kushners), a shrivelled white raisin with lint on it (Sessions), and a washcloth soaked in warm Johnnie Walker (Bannon). Their permitted moves are unclear, but every news cycle, players must select one to put in their mouths until they gag.

            See the article for the other ten rules

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            • #7
              Chess in The New Yorker

              August 31, 2019

              From the article: Magnus Carlsen was Defeated, But the Draw Remains Dominant in Chess

              By Louisa Thomas
              August 30, 2019

              https://www.newyorker.com/sports/spo...inant-in-chess

              (Carlsen) had played eight rounds in the Sinquefield Cup, in St. Louis, one of the biggest tournaments of the year, and had come away with eight draws. He clearly wanted a decisive result in this one: his preparation was deep, and his opening was daring. Instead of simply developing his pieces, tucking his king safely away and only then building an attack, he had quickly and persistently tried to create imbalances wherever he could. He had neglected his kingside. He had sacrificed a pawn. And it had very nearly worked: for the better part of three hours, Carlsen had been the aggressor. His bishop was aimed at the king; his rooks were working together; his knight was ready to leap into the action. At several points, he was a move or two from launching a mating attack. But at every critical moment, Ding had found a resource and made the right move. In the end, there was nothing. Afterward, Carlsen sat in an interview studio, wearing a navy suit and black shirt emblazoned with various sponsors’ logos. A trim beard aged his boyish face. “I don’t feel like I could have done too much differently,” he said.

              In the past, Carlsen had often won by squeezing out victories; now, he often goes for imbalanced positions, seizing the advantage at crucial moments. Or, when something is off, not. That’s where he felt the difference in St. Louis. “The very few chances that I’ve gotten I haven’t really taken,” he said.

              See also:

              https://www.newyorker.com/sports/spo...ng-has-changed


              https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...princes-gambit

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